Canadians Have 4G Network Access 75% of the Time: OpenSignal

Have you ever wondered how Canadian telcos are progressing with their 4G LTE network expansion compared to what they are keen to mention in their press releases? OpenSignal is here to answer that question with their periodical report on the state of LTE.

After analysing 17 billion measurements conducted by 500,687 OpenSignal 4G smartphone users between July 1 and September 30, both iOS and Android users in 78 countries, including Canada, the final conclusions are in, and OpenSignal has shared them with iPhone in Canada.

This time OpenSignal didn’t measure the geographical coverage of 4G networks, but availability. Canada ranked 17th with 75.42%, right below the United Arab Emirates, and above Estonia and China. In top spot we find South Korea with availability of 95.71%, followed by Japan with 92.03%. Lithuania ranked third with 84.73%.

The speed measurement also differs from the previous report, because it took into consideration 4G networks only, while the previous report showed the overall speed users got based on the speeds and availability of both a country’s 3G and 4G networks.

In the most recent report Canada ranked 22nd with a 4G speed of 26.55 Mbps, below Belgium (26.59 Mbps) and above Greece (26.46 Mbps). The speed king is Singapore with 45.86 Mbps, followed by South Korea with 45.77 Mbps. Hungary ranked third with 40–61 Mbps on average.

If you dig a little deeper into that report, they compare speeds based on technologies. Among 3G and LTE, they also have Wi-Fi. It doesn’t make any sense to do that since it’s so broad. I mean, it’s so dependent on where and what you connect to. I could provide you 10 Mbit vs 100 Mbit based on if I use 802.11g vs 802.11n. And even then, it’s all based on the internet connection backing it (to their credit, this is mentioned in the report).

raslucas

I think overall Canada rates pretty darn good considering the land mass that need to be covered. Having said that, not really sure how our carriers get from 75% coverage to the 99.whatever % 4G coverage that they advertise….

Dominic

Maybe how busy the signal is ? Also VoLTE not being available on all carriers maybe affects it ?